Alison Brumwell, chair of this year’s judging panel, commented about the books on the longlist, “The forty books selected by judges offer intimate insights into family life, superb world-building and thoughtful, incisive explorations of complex themes and issues” ( ). This is also an issue that has come up with regard to the CILIP Carnegie medal if a book is not about a Serious Issue, then recently it has rarely been considered for nomination, let alone the award. One of the reasons that the medal matters is that Carnegie winners tend to stay in print for decades. The 2013 Vintage Classic edition of Arthur Ransome’s 1936 Carnegie Medal-winning Pigeon Post. Do those from minority backgrounds only have a platform when their suffering is being explored? And how does such disproportionate variation of representation skew perspectives of minority groups?” Reflecting Realities 2017 Report from the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education ( ). That said this does however raise some important questions. This very much corresponds with the societal context of recent years and is important to acknowledge, explore and mirror in literature. Almost a third of submissions classified as containing social justice issues focused on themes of war and conflict. Only 1 of the children’s fiction titles submitted could be classified as comedy, conversely 10% of submitted books featured Social Justice themes.

This category therefore featured the highest percentage of BAME character presence. ‘Contemporary Realism’ was a category defined as books set in modern day landscapes/ contexts these amounted to 91 titles, which accounted for 56% of the fiction submissions. “The fiction titles were categorised according to a set of agreed sub-categories intended to define subject matter.

In the 2017 Reflecting Realities report, the executive summary highlights the fact that many children’s books with characters of colour are not only about Blackness (or Asianness, or being a minority ethnic member of society in general), they are about the problem of being an ethnic minority in society (national society or global society): But I wanted to conclude this phase of my blog by looking at something I rarely consider in these pages: the “non-issue” book in British children’s literature about people of colour. Apologies to those of you who regularly follow my blog it has been a busy time for me, and indeed, this will be my last blog for a while as I concentrate on other concerns and projects.

Malorie blackman books in order